Building a 2.5kwh Battery From Disposable Vapes to Power My Workshop [video]

i see more and more of them thrown in small streets and parks these days (FR).. if I had secure storage i'd take them just like that youtuber, alas

They are illegal now in the UK.

From what I know the law is passed already. And they will become illegal end of 2026.

On the other hand, free parts!

Everything is reusable if you're determined enough.

My reading of the WEEE directive is that no electrical equipment can be "disposable", it should all be recyclable and recycled.

Actual enforcement of this is non-existent. If you see a "disposable" vape discarded in the street, look for the crossed out bin logo.

They are banned here in Australia, unfortunately it has created a huge black market for these things.

Almost every neighborhood now has a cigarette store that also sells gifts and US chocolates that are basically just fronts for this stuff. Black market vapes and cigarettes. Even the police in many parts here don't really enforce this stuff.

What I find even crazier than the batteries being disposed is that some of these have some decent processor tech in them. Like this one that has a 48Mhz ARM processor in. https://ripitapart.com/category/disposable-vape-hacks/

i did not know these existed. very sick indeed.

A runaway NMC battery is notoriously difficult to extinguish, so the best thing to do is to not do it and investigate LFP prismatic cells instead.

Many people building home storage batteries use a shed a few meters away from their home.

Current building regulations in the UK are moving towards outside storage of batteries now because of NMC's having a high tendency to combust. The battery management systems do detect a lot of issues, thermal and shorts but at some point I think government is going to force these to be on the outside of houses.

The right answer is LifePO4 for home storage, does not combust and has good enough density.

Doesn't matter. If you try any of these techniques your insurer will still void your home insurance if your house catches fire.

If you have the space for it, just put it outdoors 5' from anything flammable and you're good to go. This is not a hobby for folks in apartments unfortunately.

I've had one of my DIY ebike batteries short and fail spectacularly at near full charge and was able to push it with a broom out of the garage into the driveway before any damage was done. Now I have a bench with wheels that I can take into the driveway for initial testing.

Shameless plug: we're building a repairable e-bike battery where you can use your own cells at https://infinite-battery.com

We worked on a very sturdy casing, with some specific features to release pressure and limit the fire event propagating cell to cell, you can check it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NXXfCA2CY

Distance, so a separate building far enough away from anything you want to keep that it won't carry over. Cabling underground but not in a duct. Space the cells a bit and ensure good airflow between them. A single runaway cell is how it usually starts and that in turn usually first shows up as increased internal resistance. Avoid mixing capacities, brands, different internal resistance values, cells that self-discharge, cells that have any sign of physical abuse or damage. (The guy in the video totally misses the internal resistance angle, as well as the self discharge which takes a long time to test and he already spent two months or more on his power bank.) Weld, do not solder your connections. Assemble cell groups first and then do QA on the cell groups as if they are larger capacity cells, and monitor them with a FLIR for any sign of cells misbehaving, especially under larger cell group charge/discharge currents. If a cell in the center is more than a few degrees warmer than those on the outside that's a serious concern.

Other prevention measures: strict inbound QA on the cells.

That's a lot of work, to the point that if you value your time you are better off buying a factory made pack of a reputable because they will almost certainly do a better job than you will on the safety aspect.

Getting Lithium-Ion packs right (especially larger ones) requires more up-front funds in terms of gear (especially testing gear for large volumes of cells is quite pricey) as well. The only reason I would do another (big) pack is if the form factor or capacity I want is not available at all.

The brief flash of that 'rechargeable powerbank' in the video has so much wrong with it that it isn't even funny and that's before looking inside the pack. All of those crossing wires, brrr. And those modules in the linked video don't look much better. Oh, and he's got one cell group in there with fewer cells (13:26) so that pack will unbalance immediately during charge or discharge. Effectively the whole pack has as much capacity as that one smaller cell group times the number of cell groups. The lack of integrated balancing wires is another puzzle for me, crossing balancing wires is a major headache when building larger packs, you want the very best grade of wiring for that with vibration resistant insulation and some kind of wire guide to ensure the wires can't move or cross. The whole BMS setup looks like an afterthought, rather than that it was designed in.

Oh, no interlock on the two separate breakers for the inverter (configured to work in island mode) and the house power. Wait until someone engages both. You need a transfer switch there, not two separate breakers.

His remark that it all looks 'super dodgy' and that 'I do not recommend anybody ever builds a pack like this' is an interesting one: if you are aware of all that, why do such a crap job in the first place? If you are going to go through that much work you might as well do a proper job.

Meanwhile, this is really just an ad for JLPCB. Running around the house and the workshop at everything working is a bit cringe, it is as if that's just padding to extend the video runtime.

I think there’s not much you can do other than placing it very far away from the house. Those big packs just have way too much energy.

If it reaches thermal runaway... there's not much you can do. There's simply too much potential energy in the pack.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SweatyPalms/comments/1gbryd1/factor...

Throw it in a massive body of water is about as good as you can do until the energy is depleted. (Also, making a human perform the puncture to initiate a violent chemical reaction is WILD. Do better)

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nuo0fj/...

For real dev work... essentially special sheds with massive ventilation to handle thermal runaways, rated by amount of kwh.

Proper cooling seems to be the primary thing to do.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259017452...

Proper Home Storage systems are pretty safe:

https://www.bves.de/en/2024/12/17/study-home-batteries-fire-...

There are special containers for transport of (even damaged) lithium batteries, which don't look overly bulky:

https://www.zarges.com/en/solutions/transport-and-storage-of...

Small outbuilding. Concrete pad. Cinderblock walls. Sheet metal roof. Safe distance from anything important. Typical cost is $3000-$4000. Farms often have little buildings like this.

(There are pictures of such buildings online. Search is returning awful LLM-generated garbage landing pages, so I don't have a link.)

Ideally build it in away from your house, as others have said, but in terms of actual safety systems:

-get a high quality BMS from a reputable source, it should supports current limits and thermal probes - configure current limits with as much overhead as possible, the less you drive them, the cooler they'll stay - make sure you have sufficient thermal probes inside key points in the pack(s) and that they're configured in the BMS to cut draw - add thermal fuses as well, knowing where to put these is important, too - house the packs so to minimize fire risk and cascading issues, especially if space is not a concern

> Never ever consider doing something like this.

Unless you're a hacker, and you like hacking on stuff, then by all means, read through all the warnings and please do consider doing similar to what OP did, it's a lot of fun and you'll learn a lot!

Don’t try this at home. Try it in someone else’s home first.

The creator of the video made this very clear already.

He started with festivals, but then he went to a vape shop and asked.

When I first read your comment, it makes it sound like you've been watching the video for 20 minutes and it wasn't mentioned once. Turns out he starts talking about it around the 2:00 minute mark...

Yeah he does, watch the video.

"We could replace so many data centers with old desktops."

But I assume for way more energy costs? And the manual labour to sort out the different mainboards and make everything interoperable is not free either. But I guess it means lots of opportunity for unconventional low costs projects to scramble things together. Win 10 got another year of support, but I assume next year, even more computers will be avaiable quite cheap or for free.

> A 12 year old i7 server runs my NVR, home automation setup, web server, and network router (not to mention a small handful of other services) without even breaking 25% CPU usage. We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.

Replacing concentrated and highly optimized data center servers with 10-1000X as many old desktop computers idling away at 50-100W or more would be a terrible tradeoff. That would explode the energy usage by orders of magnitude.

Well luckily according to Bill Gates the climate is not really an issue anymore [1]:

> There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

> In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.

> Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise.

Note that this is from someone who used to be one of the most focal "doomsday viewers", see for example [2] or [3].

[1]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/three...

[2]: https://youtu.be/rhNxDp8e7p8

[3]: https://youtu.be/zrM1mcKmX_c

Isn't a lot of e-waste recyclable?

I think this is only going to get worse worse, as phones, tablets and PCs are broadly a solved problem these days (outside intensive tasks). Literally nothing wrong with the 15 year old imac I have except for apple no longer supporting the OS.

This you can apply to almost everything we have been doing in the last 50 years I guess.

We're constantly being told to buy new because 1) more energy efficient, 2) better in terms of safety, 3) more environmental friendly, 4) it was built with unhealthy materials, 5) a single component is harder to replace later it with more modern xyz, if you don't replace the entire system the component is part of, 6) costs are increasing, so do it now!

You just need to understand which of the items above is essential for you, impossible to say no to.

At least you can argue that computers got better and more efficient, but disposable vapes? I don't understand how they're still legal.

> We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.

If this is true and could be done economically, why is nobody doing this right now?

Not sure how reassuring it is to you, but these computers often have a longer life on the used market, even resold multiple times. The laptops in my Hungarian household always come used, simply because they are selling here capable machines in beautiful condition, below 50% of the original market price. And when we need something new, they get resold as well.

Now of course, there are the videos from third world countries where they burn e-waste for gold, so it's not all dandy, but hey. At least we can be a little more conscious.

If a laptop costs 1000 dollars to buy, it couldn't have used more than 1000 dollars worth of hydrocarbons to create, unless firms are operating at a loss, right? Yes, the laptop required mining lithium, mining steel, turning hydrocarbons into plastics, growing silicon crystals, photolithography for the chips, running the conveyor belts for the assembly lines, etc and all those things required electricity and the electricity was mostly provided by fossil fuels, but the total amount of fossil fuels used (when considering price) couldn't have exceeded the cost of the laptop, because that would mean that some firms are spending more on fuel than they're receiving in profit, and such firms in the general case don't survive long. So if you take the cost of the laptop and then convert that to the mix of hydrocarbons used for energy at the time of the product's manufacture, that gives you an absolute upper bound of how much embodied carbon that thing must represent. It also gives you a lower bound of how efficient something has to be before you've paid for the old thing being thrown out and the new thing being manufactured.

So consider this: you have a desktop from 2010, it cost 1000 dollars, and operated at 150 watts. You consider getting a laptop today for 500 dollars, and it would have twice the nominal performance and operates at 50 watts. The total amount of embodied carbon for both of those devices has to be less than $1,500 worth of carbon dioxide produced by hydrocarbons. It can't be higher than that. Then you consider the running cost of 150 watts per hour vs 50 watts per hour. Well, back in 2010, 1000 (2010) dollars could buy you about 6000 to 9000 kilowatt hours worth of electricity when adjusting for conversion rates and electricity cost in China. Today, 500 dollars can buy about 3500 to 6500 kilowatt hours depending on whether you're buying in the US or China. So in order for the embodied carbon to be paid off for the laptop vs the desktop, let's take 7500 kilowatts for the desktop (a fair midpoint) plus 5000 kilowatts for the laptop, and then divide that by the running difference in power of the two systems: 100 watts. So if you plan on operating the laptop continuously for 13 years, the carbon savings from the efficiency gain of the new device would offset any possible carbon generated from the old device. But the laptop is twice as powerful, and what I gave was an absolute upper bound, and cannot be taken as a good ballpark estimate for how much carbon was actually produced. In the example that I gave, there was a 15-year age difference between the old system and the new system. Depending on how the devices were used, it's reasonable to assume that the right time to have replaced the desktop was back in 2023. Depending on how you use your device, it may never end up paying itself off before using less carbon than the older device. Waste is possible. But if the new device is on longer than 125,000 hours, it will have. It's just a sanity check, but it's good to have an upper bound.

the solution ofcourse is to invent a strain of bacteria that absolutely devours this stuff.

ofcourse this very obviously leads into hollywood-esque tragicomedical cataclysms...

"whats that smell... flips mouse upside down oh damn, my mouse started rotting..."

Congratulations, welcome to the dev team of Collapse OS. https://collapseos.org/

Now they are more focused on supply chain break down but your scenario would also be valid.

Someone write a novel please. Not sure who will be more appropriate: Stross (more fun?), Stephenson (more of a slog through the first 600 pages, then an abrupt 180 and frenetic action in the last 100 with newly introduced, yet game-changing characters?).

Maybe this is not such a bad side of history to be on after all.

The FreeNet is an amazing and wonderful solution to the current problem of a free network. At least for me :)

A simple deposit might fix this. Many countries already do this for glass bottles and cans. You get the money back when you return them for recycling.

Also could work for other e-waste (phones, tablets, etc.). For some goods like washing machines, this is already common. Extending that to other product categories might be doable.

It does put some additional work on shop owners that have to pay back those deposits and collect them. Which means additional bookkeeping and some mechanism that ensures they don't end up in the negative on deposits for goods bought in another shop. And of course the extra deposit means prices go up as well. Even if you get it back at the end of the product life, it is extra cost.

Vapes being thrown away casually on the street has a bigger underlying problem of littering not really having any consequences. Some people just dump their trash wherever and it's just considered normal (by them). Some big fines would be appropriate here in my view. It's negative behavior. It's easy to know when you are doing it wrong and pretty much inexcusable. The only reason people do this is that they are being sloppy and don't really care. If you are caught red handed dropping your trash where you shouldn't, it should have some consequences. I'm not a fan of the nanny state but this is an area where I wouldn't mind people being corrected quite a bit more than they currently are. I don't think this should be that controversial.

Britain has already banned disposable vapes. You aren't allowed to sell a vaping device unless it can be re-used hundreds of times - everything on the market has to have a charging port and a user-replaceable coil or pod. Rightly or wrongly, the hardware is cheap enough that some people will treat a refillable vape as if it were disposable.

Other than criminal enforcement, I'm not sure how you'd meaningfully change the incentives for someone who is willing to throw a £5 electrical device in the gutter because they can't be bothered to take it home, recharge it and refill it with £0.20 worth of liquid.

Back in my day our batteries came in a bunch of standard sizes and you could just pop them in and out of a compartiment in your electronic devices. There were collection points at any grocery store, there was even a points scheme so you could get a video game from handing in used batteries [0]. Or you could get rechargeable ones.

I'm being somewhat tongue in cheek, this still exists but I don't understand why they don't make lithium batteries in AA / AAA size or whatever for things like vapes. Battery collection, replacement and recycling is / was a solved problem.

[0] https://archive.org/details/BATTERYCHECK

Several European countries already have disposable vape bans.

> around the e-cig designs to ensure simple battery recycling would solve this.

That's still not optimal at all, if they had any imagination we'd have

- standard e-cig bases

- powered by a 18650/AA/AAA depending on the model

- deposit on the consumable part

That way you get rid of single use battery and littering all at once.

Disposable products in general should be much better regulated by the countries of the world.